Virtual(3D)Box

Lately I’ve been using open source VirtualBox for my virtualisation needs instead of KVM because it is so simple and works well (no nightmare of VMware kernel modules, vmware-any-any or any of that rubbish either!). If you haven’t tried it yet, I highly recommend that you do.

Anyway, version 2.2.0 has just been released with the following major new features:

* OVF (Open Virtualization Format) appliance import and export
* Host-only networking mode
* Hypervisor optimizations with significant performance gains for high context switching rates
* Raised the memory limit for VMs on 64-bit hosts to 16GB
* VT-x/AMD-V are enabled by default for newly created virtual machines
* USB (OHCI & EHCI) is enabled by default for newly created virtual machines (Qt GUI only)
* Experimental USB support for OpenSolaris hosts
* Shared folders for Solaris and OpenSolaris guests
* OpenGL 3D acceleration for Linux and Solaris guests
* Added C API in addition to C++, Java, Python and Web Services

Experimental OpenGL support for guests was enabled in 2.1.0 and appears to be more complete in this new release. Sun blogger Calum has released a short video of Compiz in action on an OpenSolaris guest. I have yet to test it out myself, but it looks pretty neat.

-c

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